Assassin's Tripwire. Don Pendleton

pursuit and encountered the trench network as abruptly as Yenni had. Bolan didn’t wait for them to recover, didn’t wait for them to shout a warning. He simply swept the suppressor-equipped barrel of his Beretta across the fallen, scrambling men and stroked the trigger repeatedly.

      The subsonic 9-mm rounds churned through the fallen soldiers. The men writhed and were still. Bolan, wary of a surprise attack should one of them be shamming, rifled through their web gear. He came up with three Kalashnikov rifles and half a dozen loaded magazines, which he quickly shoved into his war bag. Pausing to pop the cover from the first rifle, he ripped its bolt free and threw it as far along the trench as he could. Then he dumped the stripped rifle and checked the other two, pulling back the bolt far enough to verify that a round was chambered in each.

      He had just enough time to lift the barrel as a fourth soldier dived into the trench.

      This man had seen the lip of the excavation coming, or perhaps he’d heard the scuffle or the cough of Bolan’s suppressed Beretta. Either way, he leaped into the ditch as if he intended to make some war.

      Bolan was happy to accommodate him.

      The American soldier triggered his borrowed Kalashnikov and raked the man across the chest. The enemy gunner was dead before he finished hitting the dirt. Farther along the trench, somewhere between his current position and where Yenni had been, more soldiers were piling in from above, their weapons ready. Bolan knew he couldn’t face them all. The trench walls formed a fatal funnel that could work both for him and against him. Without the element of surprise, he would be just as vulnerable to the enemy’s guns as they were to his.

      He opted for distance, moving along the passage in a low crouch, headed away from the soldiers massing between him and Yenni. He could hear gunfire behind him and to his left. At this distance it was hard to tell Yenni’s chopped AK from the full-size Kalashnikovs chattering to meet it, but he thought perhaps he could. He didn’t need her to hold out long, and in fact, he’d meant it when he’d told her he didn’t want her to do too well in drawing fire. It was essential that the Hind eventually fix on him. He just needed a little time to work.

      Footsteps above his head brought him up short. Two lines of the Wolf’s uniformed patrolmen were now paralleling the trench on either side. Bolan crouched low so they couldn’t see him in the darkness. By his rough count, there were five on either side. He knew what they were after, too: they were walking the trench in order to sweep it clean. No doubt there were more doing the same thing in the opposite direction.

      The Hind made a closer pass and a spotlight came alive, one attached to the Hind’s nose cannon. The bright shaft played across the arid scrub and dipped in and out of the trench, back and forth, as the chopper’s pilot walked his craft sideways along the ditch.

      The patrol would see Bolan any moment now. All they had to do was point a handheld light in his direction. He raised his Kalashnikov, making sure the selector was on full automatic, and spun his body in a tight arc. The soldier blasted away at ankle level, chopping down the patrolmen, continuing his spin to raze the feet of the men at his right. Unable to process what had happened, the men simply started screaming. Bolan spared them mercy rounds with the rest of his magazine, burning half his bullets on one side, half on the other. His ears were ringing from the echoes of the gunfire as he hurried on.

      Above him, the Hind abruptly stopped its gliding, sideways pattern. Either its occupants had spotted him, which was unlikely, or they had seen the muzzle flashes of his short engagement.

      He nearly collided with the dirt bank as the trench ended. Judging the height of the walls around him and casting one more glance at the helicopter, he estimated the trajectory he would need.

      It was time.

      He slung the Kalashnikov over his shoulder, where the twin loads of both rifles and the RPG tube weighed him down. The folding e-tool he’d borrowed from Yenni snapped open from either end, forming the shovel blade and a small triangular handle. He twisted the locking collar and was grateful that the unit felt solid. He’d seen plenty of collapsible shovels that were little better than toys. Now was not the time for his tool to fail him.

      Furiously, he began to dig.

      The shooting at the other end of the trenches was chaotic now. The Wolf’s patrolmen seemed to be firing in all directions. That made Bolan smile. Yenni was a skilled guerilla fighter. She was giving them a run for their money.

      The Hind moved heavily, pausing to hover above the ground where Bolan had done his bloody work. The spotlight played over the corpses he had left behind.

      The pilot, as if reading Bolan’s thoughts, brought his nose gun up. The beam of light swept the trench, headed directly for him.

      The Hind’s automatic cannon opened up.

      Around Bolan, the earth itself exploded as the Hind’s shells ripped apart everything in the vicinity. The pilot wasn’t really sure of his target—or Bolan would have been a cloud of meat-laden mist already—but if the barrage kept up, it wouldn’t matter. Bolan’s life expectancy amid that hail of death was not measured in minutes, but in seconds.

      He lifted the RPG tube from his shoulder, aimed and pulled the trigger.

      It was an old trick the Somalis had learned, to bring down American helicopters. The back-blast from a rocket-propelled grenade launcher made it impractical to fire elevated, where the blast would hit the ground at the gunner’s feet. But dig a hole big enough to absorb that blast, and you could use a grenade launcher to take out a helicopter. The key was to strike the chopper at a point vulnerable enough to—

      Bolan’s train of thought left him as he watched the RPG go wide, too wide, trailing smoke as it arced far right of the chopper. He’d been hoping to strike the Hind in the canopy. Hitting the main rotor would be ideal, but that target was too small and too far away. Only blind luck would put the round in the Hind’s relatively vulnerable tail rotor, the key to its steering and stability.

      The rocket-propelled grenade exploded, obliterating the tail rotor.

      Bolan would have smiled if he hadn’t anticipated what would happen next. The chopper, already listing in his direction, started to spin. As it rotated, faster and faster, its massive fuselage looming in the night sky, it began to lose altitude.

      And now the Hind was coming right for him.

      Bolan ran in the opposite direction. There was no time for subtlety and no time for unnecessary weight. He dropped the RPG tube and shed his extra rifles as he went, sprinting for all he was worth along the tunnel. He needed to get out of the dug ditch, or get far enough that flames from the exploding chopper wouldn’t be funneled right to him. If he paused to try to scramble up over the lip of the trench, he might not make it in time. Worse, he might become a target for any of the Wolf’s men still operative at ground level.

      The few gunshots he could still hear in the distance were drowned by the electric death whine of the Hind as it spiraled to the ground.

      It was going to strike the trench right behind him.

      This was going to hurt.

      He felt the chopper more than he heard it. The impact reverberated through his body, enveloping him in a cloud of heat and sound and pain that crushed the air from his lungs and rattled the bones of his rib cage. The darkness briefly came alive in the light of the fireball that was the Hind. For that instant, night was day.

      The blood-soaked floor of the trench rushed up to smash Bolan in the face.

      Then there was nothing.

       3

       Al Tabkah, Syria

      Faces.

      Bolan